On the portal BSD-Hardware.info , suggesting that hardware support in FreeBSD is not as poor as commonly stated. The assessment took into account that not all equipment on the market is equally popular. There are widely used devices for which support is essential, and there are rare devices, the owners of which can be counted on one hand. Accordingly, in the assessment, the weight of each device was considered in proportion to its popularity. Information about the popularity of devices was gathered by the project Linux-Hardware.org based on equipment samples from 60,000 users over the past 5 years. Information about device support was extracted from the FreeBSD kernel.
The average share of supported devices across the most important categories (Ethernet, WiFi, ATA/IDE/RAID, graphics cards, and sound) in FreeBSD was about 90%, and this is a bottom estimate. The corresponding figure for OpenBSD was 75%, while for NetBSD it was 60%. Expectedly, the weakest area for FreeBSD was the WiFi card category, with the share of compatible devices just over 70%. Results across all categories are available in .
Thus, the issue is more about finding FreeBSD-compatible configurations among the vast array available in the market, rather than the amount of supported hardware: there is a 10% chance of encountering incompatible hardware, so it is necessary to check compatibility beforehand by referring to driver documentation, hardware databases, lists of compatible devices, and information on forums.
Source: opennet.ru
